A small bomb damaged the office of Spain's governing party in a Basque town an hour after authorities received a warning call from the armed separatist group ETA, an official said on Tuesday. No injuries were reported.
The blast, which occurred shortly after 9pm on Monday, occurred at the same time as the annual televised Christmas Eve speech by King Juan Carlos in which the monarch called for unity among political parties in the fight against terrorism.
Spain's Socialist party and the leading conservative opposition Popular Party have been divided in recent years over measures to combat ETA, an organization that has killed more than 800 people since the late 1960s in its campaign for an independent Basque homeland in a region straddling northern Spain and southwest France.
The group broke a ceasefire with a large car bombing at a Madrid airport parking garage in December last year, killing two people. It declared the ceasefire officially over in June and since then has carried out several nonfatal bombings and a shooting that killed two Spanish policemen in France.
"[The year] 2007, which started off with the anger, indignation, suffering left by the brutal attack in Barajas [airport], ends with the profound pain and firm repulsion caused by the vile killing of two young Civil Guards," the king said.
"We need as soon as possible a culture of unity which would make effective the commitment of democrats to finish with terrorism once and for all," he said.
Monday's device exploded at the back of a Socialist party office in the town of Balmaseda, near the port city of Bilbao, a police spokeswoman said.
Police said they had evacuated residents from nearby houses after the Basque roadside assistance organization DYA received the call from a person speaking in the name of ETA.
The explosion came as families and friends gathered throughout Spain for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner.
The police spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with institutional rules, said the blast caused considerable damage to the party office and smashed windows in nearby houses and cars.
The device was made up of some 5kg of explosives, police said. ETA set off a similar-sized bomb on Dec. 16 outside a courthouse in the Basque town of Sestao.
In other incidents late on Monday, gangs of youths believed to be linked to ETA threw firebombs at three banks and an insurance office in the Basque town of Gexto.
The attacks were condemned by both the Socialists and the Popular Party on Tuesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited